Narrative Structure

Scopo Networking

For my previous film, Scopo Networking, I followed a simple narrative structure. Everything happened chronologically, with Claire's obsession building as Max's updates became more revealing. The film has no dialogue other than Max's video blogs. These, along with the screen shots of his facebook updates narrate Max's view of the story. Max talks the audience through what he is experiencing, describing what he thinks is going on. In the case of Scopo Networking, Max is correct in his description of the events. Claire, despite not having any lines throughout the course of the film, is able to narrate her side of the story through facial expression, and action. Through close ups of her hands typing, her face looking, and over the shoulder shots showing what she is looking at, the audience are told what she is up to and can understand the emotions she is feeling. Both Claire and Max are 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get' characters. They aren't lying, being deceived, suffering multiple personality disorders, or in a fantasy. They are both examples of what Emily R. Anderson refers to as 'heterodiegetic narrators' in her article 'Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, Fight Club, and the Cinematic Narrator',
"...all heterodiegetic narrators are able to underreport, underread, or underregard...But heterodiegetic narrators are able to misread or misregard only if they have a persona. Furthermore, no heterodiegetic narrator is able to misreport because what a heterodiegetic narrator says automatically becomes true." (Anderson, E: 2010: 83)
I could've experimented more with the narrative in Scopo Networking, by altering the intentions of Claire's character and having Max's character misread these intentions for example. If the film was driven visually by Max's character alone, with Claire representing an unseen prescense whom the audience were only aware of through Max, then his interpretation of the story would guide the audience's understanding, thus causing them to believe what he was saying was actually true despite Max not knowing all the facts himself. This example suggests one possible way Scopo Networking could have mislead the audience by underreporting the storyline.

Current Film

Having read the article by Anderson, I feel that narrative is something I would like to explore a lot more in my current film. The current storyline, with the homeless man and the support worker swapping roles, is an abstract concept and leaves a lot of room for experimentation with narrative. I have also mentioned in a previous blog entry that I would like to explore how stereotypes function as a means for understanding reality, and I feel that playing around with narrative will enable me to explore the concept of reality a lot more.
In order to experiment fully with the narrative structure of my film I need to do a lot more research and fully develop the story that I want to be conveyed to the audience.